OBSERVATIONS / RECOLLECTIONS / STORIES

War of Words

“Tales from the White Hart” is a 1957 collection of short stories by British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. In it are 15 stories told by a scientist, Harry Purvis, to his mates at a London pub called the White Hart.

The stories are yarns — shaggy dog stories that end with a pun or a moral. For the most part, they are products of the 1950s and noticeably dated. My guess is, they reflect the attitudes of Clarke and his real pub buddies in the old days.

The last story in the collection is “The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch,” which today is somewhat controversial. Many people consider the story sexist and dismissive of women. Others say it is funny and entertaining.

I say it’s mostly the latter, with an undeniable touch of the former. The story, as I said, is dated. Like the humor of James Thurber, it reflects an earlier place and time. Feel free to be amused, or offended, or both.

In case you don’t know, “defenestration” is the throwing of a person or thing out of a window.

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The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch

By Arthur C. ClarkePublished in Tales From the White Hart, 1957

And now I have a short, sad duty to perform. One of the many mysteries about Harry Purvis — who was so informative in every other direction — was the existence or otherwise of a Mrs. Purvis. It was true that he wore no wedding ring, but that means little nowadays. Almost as little, as any hotel proprietor will tell you, as does the reverse.

In a number of his tales, Harry had shown distinct evidence of some hostility towards what a Polish friend of mine, whose command of English did not match his gallantry, always referred to as ladies of the female sex. And it was by a curious coincidence that the very last story he ever told us first indicated, and then proved conclusively, Harry’s marital status.

I do not know who brought up the word “defenestration”, which is not, after all, one of the most commonly used abstract nouns in the language. It was probably one of the alarmingly erudite younger members of the “White Hart” clientele; some of them are just out of college, and so make us old-timers feel very callow and ignorant. But from the word, the discussion naturally passed to the deed. Had any of us ever been defenestrated? Did we know anyone who had?

“Yes, ” said Harry. “It happened to a verbose lady I once knew. She was called Ermintrude, and was married to Osbert Inch, a sound engineer at the B. B. C.

“Osbert spent all his working hours listening to other people talking, and most of his free time listening to Ermintrude. Unfortunately, he couldn’t switch her off at the turn of a knob, and so he very seldom had a chance of getting a word in edgeways.

“There are some women who appear sincerely unaware of the fact that they cannot stop talking, and are most surprised when anyone accuses them of monopolising the conversation. Ermintrude would start as soon as she woke up, change gear so that she could hear herself speak above the eight o’clock news, and continue unabated until Osbert thankfully left for work.

“A couple of years of this had almost reduced him to a nervous wreck, but one morning when his wife was handicapped by a long overdue attack of laryngitis he made a spirited protest against her vocal monopoly.

“To his incredulous disbelief, she flatly refused to accept the charge. It appeared that to Ermintrude, time ceased to exist when she was talking — but she became extremely restive when anyone else held the stage. As soon as she had recovered her voice, she told Osbert how unfair it was of him to make such an unfounded accusation, and the argument would have been very acrimonious — if it had been possible to have an argument with Ermintrude at all.

“This made Osbert an angry and also a desperate man. But he was an ingenious one, too, and it occurred to him that he could produce irrefutable evidence that Ermintrude talked a hundred words for every syllable he was able to utter. I mentioned that he was a sound engineer, and his room was fitted up with Hi-Fi set, tape recorder, and the usual electronic tools of his trade, some of which the B. B. C. had unwittingly supplied.

“It did not take him very long to construct a piece of equipment which one might call a Selective Word Counter. If you know anything about audio engineering you’ll appreciate how it could be done with suitable niters and dividing circuits — and if you don’t, you’ll have to take it for granted. What the apparatus did was simply this: a microphone picked up every word spoken in the Inch apartment, Osbert’s deeper tones went one way and registered on a counter marked “His”, and Ermintrude’s higher frequencies went the other direction and ended up on the counter marked “Hers”.

“Within an hour of switching on, the score was as follows:

His 23
Hers 2,530

“As the numbers flickered across the counter dials, Ermintrude became more and more thoughtful and at the same time more and more silent. Osbert, on the other hand, drinking the heady wine of victory (though to anyone else it would have looked like his morning cup of tea) began to make the most of his advantage and became quite talkative. By the time he had left for work, the counters had reflected the changing status in the household:

His 1,043
Hers 3,397

“Just to show who was now the boss, Osbert left the apparatus switched on; he had always wondered if Ermintrude talked to herself as a purely automatic reflex even when there was no-one around to hear what she was saying. He had, by the way, thoughtfully taken the precaution of putting a lock on the Counter so that his wife couldn’t turn it off while he was out.

“He was a little disappointed to find that the figures were quite unaltered when he came home that evening, but thereafter the score soon started to mount again. It became a kind of game — though a deadly serious one — with each of the protagonists keeping one eye on the machine whenever either of them said a word.

“Ermintrude was clearly discomfited; ever and again she would suffer a verbal relapse and increase her score by a couple of hundred before she brought herself to a halt by a supreme effort of self-control. Osbert, who still had such a lead that he could afford to be garrulous, amused himself by making occasional sardonic comments which were well worth the expenditure of a few-score points.

“Although a measure of equality had been restored in the Inch household, the Word Counter had, if anything, increased the state of dissension. Presently Ermintrude, who had a certain natural intelligence which some people might have called craftiness, made an appeal to her husband’s better nature. She pointed out that neither of them was really behaving naturally while every word was being monitored and counted; Osbert had unfairly let her get ahead and was now being taciturn in a way that he would never have been had he not got that warning score continuously before his eyes.

“Though Osbert gagged at the sheer effrontery of this charge, he had to admit that the objection did contain an element of truth. The test would be fairer and more conclusive if neither of them could see the accumulating score — if, indeed, they forgot all about the presence of the machine and so behaved perfectly naturally, or at least as naturally as they could in the circumstances.

“After much argument they came to a compromise. Very sportingly, in his opinion, Osbert reset the dials to zero and sealed up the counter windows so that no-one could take a peek at the scores. They agreed to break the wax seals — on which they had both impressed their fingerprints — at the end of the week, and to abide by the decision. Concealing the microphone under a table, Osbert moved the counter equipment itself into his little workshop, so that the living-room now bore no sign of the implacable electronic watchdog that was controlling the destiny of the Inches.

“Thereafter, things slowly returned to normal. Ermintrude became as talkative as ever, but now Osbert didn’t mind in the least because he knew that every word she uttered was being patiently noted to be used as evidence against her. At the end of the week, his triumph would be complete. He could afford to allow himself the luxury of a couple of hundred words a day, knowing that Ermintrude used up this allowance in five minutes.

“The breaking of the seals was performed ceremonially at the end of an unusually talkative day, when Ermintrude had repeated verbatim three telephone conversations of excruciating banality which, it seemed, had occupied most of her afternoon. Osbert had merely smiled and said “Yes, dear” at ten minute intervals, meanwhile trying to imagine what excuse his wife would put forward when confronted by the damning evidence.

“Imagine, therefore, his feelings when the seals were removed to disclose the week’s total:

His 143,567
Hers 32,590

“Osbert stared at the incredible figures with stunned disbelief. Something had gone wrong — but where? There must, he decided, have been a fault in the apparatus. It was annoying, very annoying, for he knew perfectly well that Ermintrude would never let him live it down, even if he proved conclusively that the Counter had gone haywire.

“Ermintrude was still crowing victoriously when Osbert pushed her out of the room and started to dismantle his errant equipment. He was half-way through the job when he noticed something in his waste-paper basket which he was sure he hadn’t put there. It was a closed loop of tape, a couple of feet long, and he was quite unable to account for its presence as he had not used the tape-recorder for several days. He picked it up, and as he did so suspicion exploded into certainty.

“He glanced at the recorder; the switches, he was quite sure, were not as he had left them. Ermintrude was crafty, but she was also careless. Osbert had often complained that she never did a job properly, and here was the final proof.

“His den was littered with old tapes carrying unerased test passages he had recorded; it had been no trouble at all for Ermintrude to locate one, snip off a few words, stick the ends together, switch to “Playback” and leave the machine running hour after hour in front of the microphone. Osbert was furious with himself for not having thought of so simple a ruse; if the tape had been strong enough, he would probably have strangled Ermintrude with it.

“Whether he tried to do anything of the sort is still uncertain. All we know is that she went out of the apartment window, and of course it could have been an accident — but there was no way of asking her, as the Inches lived four storeys up.

“I know that defenestration is usually deliberate, and the Coroner had some pointed words to say on the subject. But nobody could prove that Osbert pushed her, and the whole thing soon blew over. About a year later he married a charming little deaf-and-dumb girl, and they’re one of the happiest couples I know.”

There was a long pause when Harry had finished, whether out of disbelief or out of respect for the late Mrs. Inch it would be hard to say. But before anyone could make a suitable comment, the door was thrown open and a formidable blonde advanced into the private bar of the “White Hart”.

It is seldom indeed that life arranges its climaxes as neatly as this. Harry Purvis turned very pale and tried, in vain, to hide himself in the crowd. He was instantly spotted and pinned down beneath a barrage of invective.

“So this, ” we heard with interest, “is where you’ve been giving your Wednesday evening lectures on quantum mechanics! I should have checked up with the University years ago! Harry Purvis, you’re a liar, and I don’t mind if everybody knows it. And as for your friends” — she gave us all a scathing look — “it’s a long time since I’ve seen such a scruffy lot of tipplers. ”

“Hey, just a minute!” protested Drew from the other side of the counter. She quelled him with a glance, then turned upon poor Harry again.

I will not bore you with the long and still unsettled argument as to whether Mrs. Purvis really was called Ermintrude, or whether Harry was so dazed that he automatically applied the name to her. We all have our theories about that, as indeed we have about everything concerning Harry. All that matters now is the sad and indisputable fact that no-one has ever seen him since that evening.

It is just possible that he doesn’t know where we meet nowadays, for a few months later the “White Hart” was taken over by a new management and we all followed Drew lock, stock and barrel — particularly barrel — to his new establishment.

Our weekly sessions now take place at the “Sphere”, and for a long time many of us used to look up hopefully when the door opened to see if Harry had managed to escape and find his way back to us. It is, indeed, partly in the hope that he will see this book and hence discover our new location that I have gathered these tales together.

Even those who never believed a word you spoke miss you, Harry. If you have to defenestrate Ermintrude to regain your freedom, do it on a Wednesday evening between six and eleven, and there’ll be forty people in the “Sphere” who’ll provide you with an alibi. But get back somehow; things have never been quite the same since you went.